At the beginning of the year, we wondered if a "whistleblower" might reveal the anonymous Senator who killed the whistleblower protection bill that was making its way through Congress (and had already been approved by the Senate earlier). Now, to be clear, there were many complaints about the bill, and some people claimed it was worse than what came before. However, it did seem somewhat ironic that a Senator would choose to use an anonymous hold on a bill about whistleblowing. The folks at WNYC's On The Media program are attempting to find out which Senator put the hold on by having volunteers ask their Senators and report back. As of this writing, there are a bunch of "No" answers, but still a lot of blanks.

Last month, we mentioned that the Senate had given its approval to a new law protecting whistleblowers in the federal government. There were some problems with the bill, which led some to fight against it, but much of the bill was useful. With the whole Wikileaks stuff going on, there had been some concern that such a law might lead to similar leaks, but most of Congress recognized that protecting whistleblowers is important. Except for one anonymous Senator. Even though the bill had already passed the Senate. After the House took a bunch of stuff out of the bill, it went back to the Senate again, where an anonymous Senator put a hold on the bill, effectively killing it. It does seem kind of silly that a Senator can do this anonymously. Of course, we can hope that, in the long run, this will work out for the best. Perhaps sometime in the future Congress can pass a better bill that is actually much more protective of whistleblowers.

We were just highlighting how the government is terrible at protecting whistleblowers -- with particular attention to the horrific treatment of Bradley Manning. As all of this is going on, it's worth pointing out that the Senate (apparently without much sense of irony) has passed a "Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act," which would seek to grant greater protections to government employees who blow the whistle on government wrongdoing. Of course, some have concerns with the new bill, in that it specifically weakens some protections for "the intelligence community," while increasing protections for other government employees.

The EFF is helping out in a case to look at whether or not you have an expectation of privacy in your email. The details of the case itself are really quite stunning, so I'll just repeat the EFF's summary:

The whistleblower, Charles Rehberg, uncovered systematic mismanagement of funds at a Georgia public hospital. He alerted local politicians and others to the issue through a series of faxes. A local prosecutor in Dougherty County, Ken Hodges, conspired with the hospital and used a sham grand jury subpoena to obtain Mr. Rehberg's personal email communications. The prosecutor then provided that information to private investigators for the hospital and indicted Mr. Rehberg for a burglary and assault that never actually occurred. All the criminal charges against Mr. Rehberg were eventually dismissed. Hodges is currently running for Attorney General of Georgia in the Democratic primary.

Mr. Rehberg filed a civil suit against the prosecutors and their investigator for their misconduct, but the appeals court erroneously ruled that he did not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in his private email.

Scary stuff. And it gets worse, too, as apparently the court gave "immunity to county prosecutors and their investigators for manipulating and fabricating "evidence" and defaming Mr. Rehberg as a felon in comments to the press."

This seems like a massive abuse of power to punish a whistleblower, using emails obtained via questionable means. Bad news all around.

You may recall that, a year ago, the company Cash4Gold got into some hot water after some rather unflattering stories were written about the company and its practices. Some former employees acted as whistleblowers to explain some of the more questionable practices the company adhered to. In response, rather than proving them wrong or cleaning up its act, Cash4Gold threatened and then sued Consumerist, a complaints website, and two whistleblowers. Of course, the lawsuit just encouraged Consumerist to dig deeper and find even more questionable practices on the part of Cash4Gold. Late last year, the company seemed to realize that suing Consumerist was not a smart move and dropped the lawsuit against the site, though it continued its suit against the whistleblowers.

Consumerist is now reporting that the lawsuit against the whistleblowers is now over as well, but they don't explain exactly what happened. The implication is that Cash4Gold has finally dropped the lawsuits, though it doesn't say that exactly. Plus, the two former employees are reasonably upset that their names are splashed all over the news as being involved in a lawsuit over "breach of contract" from a former employer. Of course, in suing for breach of contract, the company was effectively admitting that what the whistleblowers said was true rather than false.

Separately, Consumerist notes that while this lawsuit is over, things keep looking worse for Cash4Gold, as the Florida state Attorney General has now started an investigation into the company's practices.

So, good work, Cash4Gold. Not only did your actions lead to significantly more attention to your questionable practices, your lawsuit against those who exposed you didn't accomplish anything other than giving them an opportunity to expose more of your practices, and the end result is an investigation from state officials. Maybe next time focus on improving your business, rather than suing those who expose your shady practices.

It looks like the folks over at Cash4Gold have finally realized that it wasn't a particularly smart move to sue Consumerist for reporting on various allegations made against Cash4Gold. The company has dropped that part of the lawsuit, though it continues to sue the ex-employees it accuses of both defamation and "publishing any more confidential, proprietary information" (and, note, they don't say which info was defamatory or which was confidential and proprietary). Consumerist makes it very clear that this wasn't a settlement. They didn't ask to be dropped from the case or agree to anything. One would guess that somewhere down the line a lawyer explained to Cash4Gold that its likelihood of winning such a case was about as close to zero as you could imagine...

Earlier this year, we wrote how odd it was that the company Cash4Gold (made famous by its cheesy late night commercials) was threatening to sue bloggers for defamation for merely repeating and linking to a Consumerist article that quoted a former Cash4Gold employee about allegedly underhanded tactics used by the company. The defamation threat was odd for a variety of reasons. First, Cash4Gold itself was talking about these same allegations on its own website (which is actually the best way to deal with them: respond to them, rather than trying to silence them). Second, going the legal route only guaranteed much more attention to the issue and questions surrounding Cash4Gold's activities. Third, it made little sense to threaten someone who was merely summarizing what others were saying.

While Cash4Gold apparently backed off such threats, it did go forward and get an injunction against the former employee to stop her from "publishing any more confidential, proprietary information, and any defamatory information on the internet." I like how it mixes in confidential, proprietary and defamatory information -- so now we don't know which the original reports were. Were they defamatory lies? Or were they just confidential, proprietary information?

Either way, with that injunction, the company contacted Complaints Board -- the site where the employee originally put forth the allegations -- and Consumerist, who also posted on the allegations, and demanded they remove the posts. Of course, with no legal order, both sites refused to do so. In response, Cash4Gold has now sued both sites, once again guaranteeing that much more media attention is paid to alleged claims of underhanded business practices by the company.

Of course, rather than backing down, Consumerist is fighting this and has posted a lengthy and detailed article reviewing the original claims, backing many of them up with additional reporting details and pointing out that this is an ongoing news story that it believes it has every right to write about. Once again, though, we're left wondering why Cash4Gold would do this. All it's doing is drawing that much more attention to the claims against it.

The Citizen Media Law Project post above details two additional factoids about how Cash4Gold's lawyers are trying to get around the rather obvious (it seems) Section 230 safe harbors that almost certainly protect Complaint Board. First, they claim that because Complaint Board edited the title of the post, they're no longer just a service provider, but "created, developed and published." That seems like a long shot. Perhaps more likely to succeed is a reference to the recent Barnes ruling, where Section 230 was tossed out the window after the company promised to delete the content in question (and then didn't). Of course, it's not clear if Complaint Board did, in fact, promise that, but Cash4Gold claims that it did.